This invention relates to a method and apparatus for fingerprint verification of identity, and more particularly for verification that a person presenting a card, such as for credit, is the one to whom the card has been issued by comparing the persons' fingerprint with one on the card.
The use of cards for credit and other purposes has become so widespread that preventing the use of lost or stolen cards has become a major problem. One possible solution is the use of a secret code in conjunction with an individual code, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,198,619, for personal verification. A coded check system described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,824,544 is typical of that approach, but the approach requires the use of a computer for the necessarily complex decoding operation.
A more direct approach which does not necessarily require a computer is the use of a fingerprint on the card for identification. While several systems using this approach have been proposed, they are too complex to be practical in their entirety, such as the system disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,202,120, or in their implementation, such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,947,128 and 4,053,228 which require oscillating an image of a fingerprint relative to a permanent record for comparison, or scanning the fingerprint with a light beam and correlating the reflected beam with a hologram of a permanent record of the fingerprint.
The present invention uses a transparency of the permanent record for a direct comparison of a person's fingerprint. Others have proposed such an approach, but the implementations have been too complex to be of practical use on a wide scale due to the optical elements required to focus the images on a focal plane where one is superimposed on the other. See for example U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,398,558, 3,584,958 and 3,619,060, which best exemplify the prior art. An object of this invention is to provide a simple and direct method and apparatus for comparing a fingerprint of a person presenting a card with a fingerprint recorded on the card without the use of optical elements for focusing and superimposing images.